Attacking the Pile of Stuff: The New Yorker of Dec. 2, 2013

In Warsaw, the other week, a Filipino diplomat sobbed while addressing the U.N. climate summit; he had family in the typhoon-ravaged country. “We may have ratified our own doom,” he said, alluding to the slow pace of negotiations for curbing international emissions. He announced that he was starting a hunger strike, for the duration of the summit, and was given a standing ovation.

From Ian Johnson’s “In the Air,” an account of “China’s most polluted cities”:

Handan is a city “two hundred and fifty miles southwest of Beijing” with “an urban core of 1.4 million inhabitants . . . It abuts the Tailing mountains” which, “thanks to rich deposits of coal and iron ore,” have made the region “one of the world’s great centers of steel production . . . One of the provinces that border the Taihang range . . . accounts for ten per cent of the world’s output.” The locals grow vegetables under the smoke billowing from factories. It’s one of the dirtiest environments in the world.

There’s a poem by Mary Jo Bang that self really likes:

All Through the Night

The rotational earth, the resting for seconds:

hemisphere one meets hemisphere two, thoughts twist apart at the center seam. Everything inside is, Cyndi Lauper and I both fall into pure emptiness. That’s one way to think: I think I am right now.We have no past we won’t reach back — The clock ticks like the nails of a foiled dog chasing a faster rabbit across a glass expanse.

The Annals of Law essay, by Rachel Aviv, concerns the way Social Service agencies have made a deliberate choice “to err on the side of overreaction, because the alternative could be devastating. Social workers recognize that if they recommend returning a child to a deadly home “it will be a career ender.” Thus, they “choose a knowable tragedy, the separation of a parent and child, in order to prevent an unknowable one.”

Heartbreak, right there. The article focuses on a mother, a Kuwaiti immigrant named Niveen, who’s been accused of child neglect. Her three-year-old son, Adam, who was in Montessori pre-school, fell and “his tooth came loose, making it painful to chew.” Naveen took several days off from work to feed him herself. After missing several days, her boss says, “With you it’s always something.” Here’s the rest of that paragraph:

Then she imagined the way her boss would look at her the next time she came, and felt suddenly ashamed. She got up, brushed her teeth, put some snacks in a ziploc bag, gave them to Adam, and left the house. “It was mechanical — I wasn’t thinking anymore,” she said. “Things were upside down, but I kept everything to myself. I was just trying to survive.”

Her son “had been alone for ninety minutes when police officers arrived . . . ” It’s a gripping article (as almost all The New Yorker Annals of Law articles have been), one that really tries to see things from the mother’s point of view.